KIKK festival 2013

KIKK festival 2013 in Namur, Belgium

Just came back from the KIKK festival in Namur. This was a really great event, with excellent conferences and workshops. I also had the chance to conduct interviews with Ensadlab colleague Emeline Brulé, both for Alpha Beta Magazine and our research lab.

conferences, workshops and interviews

We are currently transcribing and processing interviews with Evan Roth, Ivan Poupyrev, Jessica Walsh and others. The main topics discussed included: education, technological push, rapid prototyping and engaging people in public spaces. We also participated in a workshop led by Ubi de Feo called “from 0 to C” on using tangible objects and real-world metaphors to teach programming.

Interviewing Evan Roth on activism and humor to get digital natives engaged politically.Ubi de Feo’s workshop aimed at, amongst other things, helping children count in binary and understand various concepts related to programming (functions, types of data and network communication).Some of the wooden tiles used to understand ASCII and its relation to bits and bytes.Samples from the Glitch Knit workshop with Claire Williams. A hacked knitting machine (with the Knitic project) uses glitchy images as reference patterns.Ivan Poupyrev on stage showing switches made of fiber optics. See this link for more detail.Kyle McDonald talking about his Inbox Zero Residency in Korea.Interviewing Jessica Walsh on her approach to teaching graphic design.Jessica Walsh on stage talking about her work philosophy.The Dyskograf by Sati & Yro. A camera “reads” the 33rpm paper disk underneath it and generates music in real-time.

exhibitions

An exhibition space was set up just 5 minutes from the main venue. Here is a short video showcasing some of the projects on display.

Overall an outstanding festival, very well put together in a friendly atmosphere. Hat tip to the organizers and to the sponsors, looking forward to KIKK 2014!